


Te Deum

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Harsh Realm
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a journey is made, a meeting is had, and a sun finally rises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Te Deum

_Te Deum laudamus:  
te Dominum confitemur.  
Te aeternum Patrem  
omnis terra veneratur._

It's not that imposing a place. Say the word "monastery" and you think of Gothic architecture, arches and spires and gargoyles, lots of heavy stonework and giant, intimidating doorways. Silent cloisters. Something on a hill or a craggy mountain somewhere. This isn't that. It's on a hill, but that's where any similarity to that monastery of cliché ends. It's a collection of low brick buildings with a few trees scattered here and there around the perimeter. Looking at it, Tom Hobbes realizes that it used to be some kind of municipal campus. Local government buildings, maybe, though the paved road leading up to them is potholed and poorly maintained. Whatever locality it used to service burned to the ground long ago. Now it stands solitary and unprepossessing, and Tom starts up the broken road towards it.

Three years ago this place would not have survived. It's too exposed, out here like this. But there's no Guard anymore. There's no one left who cares who or what anyone worships, except for a few pockets of killing, dying extremists. _Freedom of religion._ It's a nice little phrase in a document, until you're faced with what it really means.

Cresting the top of the hill, Tom pauses again to look at the place. There's no gate. There's a low stone wall around what he supposes could be called a compound. A flat and broken area of blacktop which he guesses once served as a parking lot. Between two buildings he can see what looks like a small vegetable garden. In one corner of the lot are a few scrubby trees, perhaps fruit trees, though he can't see any fruit in the branches. One building looks bigger and more important than the rest; he can see a discolored place over the double doors where there was once a sign. On the lawn a few yards from the steps is the metal base which used to support a flag pole.

There's no flag to fly anymore. Not the stars and stripes or the crossed swords of Santiago's state. In a sense it's liberating, though any feeling of liberation dulled months ago. He's come here with no armed guards, no entourage. Who are you when you're no one?

Exactly who you've always been.

Tom walks up the short flight of steps to the door and, not knowing quite what else to do, he knocks. No immediate sounds from inside. Somewhere in the trees-that-might-be-fruit-trees, a bird sings. It's a cloudy late afternoon, grey and abstract, and standing here outside the ruin of a long-dead government, Tom feels a strong sense of being displaced in time. It all seems very appropriate.

From inside he hears the soft chiming of a bell, gauzy and indistinct. A handbell, maybe. Nothing large, but sweet and tuneful. Then silence, until there's a rustling behind the door, the sound of a lock being turned, and it opens upon a tall, middle-aged man in a simple brown robe, ancient sneakers peeping out from under the hem. Tom looks at him and the man looks back with placid black eyes.

"I'm here to--" Tom starts, and the man cuts him off with a whisper. "This is the hour of None. We are silent at this time until Vespers."

"Oh." Tom looks behind him as though he's unsure of something, then back at the man, dropping his own voice into a whisper. "Should I come back after that?"

The man is silent for a time, for a long time, and Tom is about to turn and go back down the hill again, back to he's not even sure what, the carcasses of burned houses, dead roads, the crushing expectations of a million people and a country barely holding itself together, when the man speaks.

"Hospitality to a stranger is an offering unto God. There is a storm coming." He stands aside, holding the door open. "Enter, but keep silent. You may wait in the library until the Abbot will see you."  


* * *

  
The library is a small, musty room lined with bookshelves, not the dark wood that he would have expected but what looks like Ikea pressboard and stuff scavenged from thrift stores. Haphazard and missmatched. The books range from rare-looking hardcovers to trade paperbacks. Augustine's Confessions and Tim LaHaye's Left Behind. Tom fingers the last with a faintly sardonic smile, a smile that would have looked more at home on quite a different face. The Tribulation happened, all right. Only the Rapture got canceled. No one got a get-out-of-jail-free card. Everyone caught in the same shit, trying to get through alive.

He's not sure how long he waits. There's an old armchair in a corner and he sinks into it, disturbing yet more dust which dances up into the falling grey light. The whole room has the feeling of a place which isn't actually used all that often, and he wonders if maybe the books here are never read, if the monks only collect them simply to possess them, relics of a world when what and who they are actually meant something. Outside in the distance comes a rumbling of thunder, and then the gentle patter of rain on the windowpanes.

Unbarred windows. Unbroken ones. It's still something of a novelty.

He finally looks up when the door at the far side of the room opens, and the tall man enters again, followed by a shorter, balding man with a nonetheless more impressive presence. He moves slowly but not obviously so, giving every bit the impression of a man operating entirely on his own time. He nods once to the tall monk, who returns the nod and withdraws. The man fixes Tom with a steady gaze, then turns, moves behind a desk at one end of the room and takes a seat in a battered office chair.

"I am the Abbot Martin St. John," he says simply. His voice is low and dry, and what he says is no surprise at all. Tom stands and inclines his head. Respect in this circumstance is probably a good idea, even for a man with, in theory, an army at his back.

No army here.

"I'm Tom Hobbes."

The Abbot waves a dismissive hand. "I know who you are, boy. Everyone does. The Simple Man, eh? Quite a job you did." The look the Abbot gives him suggests that he has no great opinion of the job Tom has done. That's not exactly new, either. Tom shuffles his feet, clears his throat, regrets both things instantly. They make him look weak.

He's spent too much time in meetings like this.

"I do the best I can."

"Do you, now?" The Abbot arches one clearly defined eyebrow. "Well. Well, if you're not here to apologize about failed infrastructure, poor security, or the fact that it's been three years and we still can't get clean water to come out of our taps, what exactly _are_ you here for?"

Tom looks down, up at the ceiling, out the rain-streaked window, at an ancient copy of the Apocrypha. Anywhere but here. That's exactly where he'd like to be. Is anything ultimately worth this? When he could be home right now, instead of trying to put an entire country back together with his bare hands and a thousand angry people screaming for his head?

Except he couldn't be there. So he's here.

"There's someone here... someone I'd like to see."

"Who?"

Tom tells him. The Abbot's eyebrow rises higher.  


* * *

  
They point him in the direction of the little vegetable garden and let him go. It's down a hall, they say in their rustling paper monastic voices, down a white hall with cinderblock walls, like a goddamn elementary school, down a hall and just out that door there. There's a little porch and then the garden. It's the hour of Vespers and the world outside is darkening. Again, somewhere in the depths of the building, the bell is chiming.

It's a long hallway to walk down, like something out of a hundred TV dream sequences. Tom walks it, listening to his footfalls, the footfalls of others going to their prayers. Two people have been excused from it and Tom is one. When he reaches the door—glass panels, again, such a luxury—and pulls it open, his nose is assaulted by the smell of wet soil. Behind him, from the same place as the bell, a single voice, chanting.

_Deus, in adiutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina._ O God, come to my assistance.

Tom doesn't know Latin. He steps out onto the little patio, sheltered partially and inadequately by a short overhang. There's a man standing to the side, hood pulled up over his head, watching the rain. Maybe watching nothing. He's tall but not very tall, solidly built but somehow undernourished, with a faint slump to his shoulders that Tom would know in silhouette any time of the day or night, even after three years.

He steps forward, licks his lips; they're dry even though there's water everywhere, the air is literally dripping with it.

"It'll drown the fuckin' carrots," the man mutters. Tom's mouth twists hard.

"Hello, Mike."  


* * *

  
Not much has changed. It seems ridiculous to think that, because they're standing here in a goddamn vegetable garden with the rain pounding down all around them, and Mike is wearing the robes of a monk. When he pulls his hood back he's thinner and older, more lines around his mouth and eyes and a long, narrow scar down one cheek, and he's grown a short beard which oddly changes the shape of his face. But he also hasn't changed. All these things can be true. Tom stares at him, hands working at his sides, and Mike stares back.

"The fuck're you doing here?"

"Should you be using words like that now?"

Mike snorts. "Fuck you, GI. You been outside lately? There's no room for squeaky clean." He glances back at the low main building and something in his face changes, both softens and hardens. "That's not why we're here."

Tom follows his gaze. No, no one's squeaky clean, not anymore. Certainly not himself. "So why are you here?"

"The Abbot says we're here to give the world a center."

"No, I mean..." Tom crosses his arms over his chest. The sun is almost gone and the rain is chilling the air, but he feels it like background noise, faint and inconsequential. Not much is real right now except the man in front of him. "Why are you here?"

Mike's attention snaps back to Tom with a sharpness that's almost audible. "You of all people shouldn't be asking that."

"Right." He shuffles his feet and stares at the cracked pavement under them. There's plants pushing up through the cracks, little weeds, deceptively strong. One day they'll take it over entirely, break it into pieces and cover it, if there's no one to mix new cement and lay a new slab. The thought is both horrifying and comforting. Maybe it's better to accept transience. "Well, I just... I wanted to see how you were."

"Bullshit." But it's not said with a snort of derisive laughter or even any sarcasm. Tom looks up again and Mike's face is tired, sad, and older than he's ever looked. There's pain behind it that has the look of pain that's been here for a long time, eating away at the inside of him and never fading. Digging its hooks in deeper so that not even time can dislodge it.

He reaches out and touches Tom's arm, hesitantly, like he's not even sure he's really there, and when the touch comes Tom finds himself resisting a sudden and impossibly strong urge to pull away. A touch like that... How long has it been? Three years, but three years doesn't mean the same thing all across the board.

"You're gonna ask me to come back."

"So what if I was?"

"You know what the answer is." Mike sighs and drops his hand away, looks out at the rain and the darkening evening. "You knew it before you got here. You knew this was fucking pointless and you came anyway." He looks back at Tom and there's a pained smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. The corner he always smiled with first, Tom thinks. "That's so you."

"Can't really be anyone else."

"No, you can't." From inside the building, the bells are chiming again. Mike looks up as though he's just remembered where he is, what he's supposed to be doing, like he's been dreaming on his feet. He shakes his head slightly, and Tom feels whatever had been starting between them disappear like smoke. That's how it's always been. Here one second and gone the next. At first it had just been infuriating. Then it had made everything more precious. Mike puts a hand on the door, looks back at him. "I have to pray."

_Pray._ Mike had never prayed, not that Tom ever saw. "What do you pray to?"

Mike gives him a hard look, hand still on the door handle. "We pray to God, Hobbes."

"No. What do _you_ pray to?"

"Fuck you." With the way he says the words, Tom almost expects anger, but when he meets his eyes in the dim light he just sees more weariness. In its own way, it's worth being angry over, that he can't muster up that much energy now. _What the hell did I do to you?_

"I have to go," Mike repeats dully. "You can come and watch if you can keep your trap shut."

He should go, too. He should head out into the rain, damn the rain, damn the cold and the rising wind, head off down the hill and into the burned village, huddle in the rubble and wait for dawn. Freezing and hungry. It'd be just like old times, except he's alone now.

Alone.

He should go, but he follows Mike into the building and down the weirdly bland hallway, moving with a slow, defeated shuffle as the gentle sound of the bell grows louder and louder.  


* * *

  
Like the rest of the place, the room where the monks gather is small and unprepossessing; no lofty sanctuary or ornate stalls, no arches or stained glass. It has the look of a room which might have been used for staff meetings, with plain white walls and acoustic tiles, now with those white walls lined with chairs. The chairs have clearly been scavenged from anywhere they could be found intact; some are wooden dining chairs, some metal folding chairs, a few of the plastic picnic table variety. It should be an atmosphere entirely unsuited to prayer, but there's no electric light, and the room is lit by massive brass candelabras, casting eerie, flickering shadows around the room. The monks are seated here and there in the chairs with no apparent pattern, hoods let back and heads bowed, and the dim light makes their faces look sharp and craggy. All is silent. Tom stands in the doorway, unsure of what to do from here, but Mike prods him gently in the back and whispers, "Move. Take a seat somewhere and shut up."

So he does.

It's a chair toward the back, if there is a back, and the door. There's no altar, no sanctuary, no obvious center of focus. He finds himself feeling queerly displaced, here in this monastery that looks like no monastery he's ever imagined, the light uneven and shifting in and out of shadow, and there's Mike barely feet away, his hood slung back and his head bowed in apparent contemplation. A few others file silently in, no sound except the rain outside and the creaking of the chairs as they take their seats. Tom glances at them but his attention is locked on this man he's come to see, this man who seems to have changed entirely and changed not at all.

Finally the Abbot enters, and he's as silent as the rest; if Tom were not looking up he would not have even known he was there. But the quality of the room itself has changed in a way that's impossible to pin down. Still dim, still silent, but there's a sense of apprehension, a charge of potential energy building in everything, and Tom finds himself growing breathless. He remembers, all in a flash like a sudden flare from the candles, the old man in New Orleans, who tossed his bones and muttered his spells, cast a hand across the whitened carpus and they began to shiver and rise. _Papa Legba, open the gate for me, Ago-e_

The Abbot takes his seat in no special place that Tom can tell, and then for a time, for what feels like a long time, all is stillness. His breaths roar in his ears, his hands folded and tight in his lap, and when he looks at Mike again it seems that Mike is looking at him without looking at him at all.

_I shouldn't be here. This isn't meant for me to see._ In these latter days, religion is far more than doctrine and liturgy and dusty rituals. He's learned. He's learned the hard way.

And the chanting begins.

It starts as a low murmur, barely audible, a thrum hardly louder than his own pulse. But it gathers and grows, so slowly that he doesn't even notice it directly until it's a throbbing, buzzing sound, vibrating through the air and trembling into his ears. None of it is even identifiable as words, but when his gaze falls on Mike again he sees his lips moving, rapidly, with force. And it builds, louder, until suddenly he's almost cowering back against the wall, overwhelmed before he even knew it was happening, bowled over and helpless in the drench of the sound. He thinks of the crashing of ocean waves, that pounding that never ceases, and now he hears the words.

_Ut quid Domine recessisti longe dispicis in oportunitatibus in tribulatione._

They're beautiful, though he can't begin to glean the meaning, and he only notices that his lips have begun to move with the chant long after it's happened. He feels lifted and transported by it, unaccountably lighter and stronger, and the candles seem brighter, or maybe it's just his own vision. The room, the people, and him all feel as though they're coming unmoored in time and space, and he remembers something else, opening his eyes into a desert sunrise with Mike lying whole and alive beside him, breathing and beginning to move again, reaching out a stunned hand to touch his face.

The chant ends suddenly and too soon. He reaches up to touch his own face in an unconscious echo of the memory and discovers that he's weeping. He ducks his head, abruptly self-conscious, and hopes that he's hidden in the dimness.

The Abbot stands slowly, as though he's stiff from a long time in the same position. There's no sure telling how long they've been here.

"That which you do unto the least of my brethren, you have done unto me," murmurs the Abbot, and he inclines his head slightly in Tom's direction. He ducks his head further. The shadows are not deep enough. "Let us welcome the stranger in our midst, according to the commandment."

They all rise at once and begin to move toward him. He finds himself shrinking back, because the instincts of long years don't die easily and suddenly he's very aware that he isn't armed. But the first monk to reach him only lays a hand on his shoulder, as if in blessing, before he passes by and out of the room.

The others follow, somehow moving slowly and rapidly both at once, and he's too stunned to put up any resistance. The worshipful looks, the crowds, the people stricken dumb with shyness, the hesitant hands reaching out to touch his skin and clothes, he's used to that, if one ever can be, but this is not that. They're giving their blessing like it's a favor extended to him, as though they do him honor and not the other way around.

Weirdly, he almost feels insulted.

Mike is the last, and there's no gentle touch on his shoulder. He stands there, hood pulled up and shadowing his eyes, and Tom doesn't know if he's looking at him or not.

Finally a hand emerges from the folds of the rope and offers itself to him. He takes it without thinking, and when he gets to his feet his legs are trembling.

"What was that?"

"Magic." The word is said entirely deadpan, and he doesn't know, even after all this time, if Mike's making fun of him or not.

But he probably is.

Mike turns and walks and he follows silently, not knowing what else to do. The hallway is deserted, as though there never was anyone else in the building but the two of them.

"You do that for all your visitors?"

Mike pulls his hood back and gives Tom a look that he can't quite parse. "We don't get visitors. You're the first person to see that. First who isn't one of us."

_One of us._ Tom shivers slightly and the distance between them feels as though it extends past mere space. Maybe it was always wider than he knew. "So why'd they let me watch?"

He snorts lightly. "You know why. Don't play coy. You can't be used to being special that fast."

"It's been three years." The words sting, and he's freshly conscious of the drying tears on his cheeks. "Anyway, they don't do that anymore." They complain and demand, and some of them take up arms. How many uprisings has he had to put down in the past fourteen months? How many more will there be?

"You got too close to them." Mike smiles a thin knife edge that can cut if he wants it to. "Gods can't come too far down. They get boring." He pauses, eyes searching Tom's face, blue and cold. "They disappoint."

"You never said I disappointed you."

"Who says you did?"

Tom sighs and leans back against the cinderblock wall, scrubbing a hand over his face. There's something obscene about talking like this, here, after what he's just seen. "You're here."

"I'm here." And this time the smile is less thin, more sad, and more cruel, Mike must know that, because it sends an ache into Tom's chest that grips him like a heart attack and threatens to crumple his still-trembling legs under him. It was never supposed to be like this. He doesn't even know what it was supposed to be like. They should have won and that should have been the end of it, and instead it's three years later and he's alone and exhausted, and Mike is living on a hill and doing magic in the dark.

The world collapsed, is what happened. It's been a long, slow collapse and he's just now seeing it.

A hand against his face, and again he remembers that desert sunrise. After it there had been confused anger and resentment, but in those first few moments there had only been wonder. _You brought me back. I had to. Why?_

You knew this was fucking pointless and you came anyway. That's so you.

"You should eat." The hand vanishes and when he raises his eyes Mike's turned away, moving down the hall again. "We've got a spare bed somewhere. You can leave first thing tomorrow."

_You can leave._ And there it is. The clearest dismissal he's likely to get. Somehow it's worse than a direct order. Like he wouldn't want to stay. Like he'd be waiting to go.

And maybe he is.

He walks down the hall, following again, and he knows he's walking away from that desert sunrise. _But he walked away first._  


* * *

  
The food is all out of cans, and there's no bread. There's not much yeast to be had, anymore, and he hears that out in the further reaches people are fighting over flour. Not that that's new. People fight over everything. People fight.

After the food he's shown to his room, slightly larger than a closet with a single army cot and a candle in a solidified pool of wax. A monk he doesn't know leads him to it, and as they pass an open door he glances in and sees rows of bunks like boot camp. It amuses him, in a cold way, though he couldn't say why.

Now he sits in the dimness with the candle wick sputtering in its melting wax and he's thinking about so many nights on the ground in the cold, shivering because they'd put the fire out because a fire telegraphs their presence. Sleeping on the ground, only he's not sleeping for his own shivering, and sliding a little closer to Mike, entirely without thinking about it, and Mike lays a hand on his shoulder even as he mutters something snide.

It used to be so easy. It should have been endlessly hard but in fact, compared to this, it had been one of the easiest things he'd ever done. Storming the fence had been easy. Fighting their way up the steps of the government center had been easy. Pulling the final trigger—that had been the easiest thing of all. And then everything after that had been impossibly difficult.

He makes a quiet sound and covers his face with his hands. Can't go back. No clear way forward. This was always a place where Florence would find a way to lead him, but the stone with her name carved into it is far away, far beyond where the boundary of the fence used to be, and her body is nowhere at all. They worked, when it was the three of them. Then, for a while, they limped on as the two of them, holding on and holding each other up and curling together for warmth at night even though that kind of cold was a long way in the past.

And then there was one.

He never should have come here, but it was as inevitable as everything else has been. Put two magnets close enough on a table and they pull towards each other until they meet, and the whole of the Realm wouldn't be big enough to put a workable space between them.

Or you flip one magnet over, and nothing can keep them together.

There's a soft knock and he looks up. It's late. He's been sitting here a long time. For an uncountable number of minutes there's been silence outside his door. The monks are asleep and the candles are extinguished, but again there's that soft knock.

He clears his throat roughly. Not crying, not this time. It's all bled out of him and what he feels is exhaustion. "Come in."

The door opens and he's not at all surprised to see Mike step inside, hood still pulled up to shadow his eyes, shutting the door behind him, and the air is so still that the sound of the catch in the door latch is awkward and loud.

He looks up simply, face neutral, wondering if this is goodbye. He plans to leave early, after all. Before sunrise, if he wakes up in time. If he sleeps. "Come to remind me what a bad idea this was?"

Mike makes a small, unreadable noise and pulls his hood back. Once again, the beard is somehow jarring. All those years on the run and he still found time to shave now and then. Now he's not running. With a twinge of surprise, Tom realizes that he had started letting it grow in the days and weeks after they'd taken the City.

He hadn't noticed at the time. He hadn't noticed. _Jesus._ What else had he missed?

"I don't know why I'm here," Mike says, and his voice is as blunt and as simple as Tom's face. Tom had always thought it was funny, how they'd called him The Simple Man, when all he'd done was make everything endlessly more complicated. _We're both too tired for any more complications._

"You don't know why you're here, either. Not really."

Tom blinks once or twice. "So tell me."

"I can't tell you." Mike is shaking his head slowly, mouth tightening, and suddenly Tom would give anything in the world to see him angry again, really _angry,_ just for once. "You always wanted me to tell you shit like that, Hobbes. You always wanted me to do the work. Couldn't face it yourself, what was happening. Jesus Christ, you kept _writing her letters,_ even after--" He stops and looks firmly away, at the candle, at the light flickering against the wall.

"You can't say it either," Tom says softly.

"If--" Mike looks at him again and there's something desperate in his gaze, something pleading, and suddenly Tom's sure: he doesn't want to be here either. This was the last choice in a series of choices he hadn't wanted to make, hadn't expected to have to make, and he'd made it alone. "If one of us had said it out loud, would it have changed anything?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

Mike laughs then, a thin sound with a faint edge of hysteria. In the dimness of the candlelight his eyes are almost hidden in the hollows of his sockets, even with the hood pulled back. He's thinner, Tom thinks again. Somehow. Thin in a way he never was before. "Not much point now, is there?"

"They destroyed the last portal." It just comes out of him, hard like a rock being thrown through a window, plain and unignorable, and for the first time in his increasingly scattered memories Mike looks genuinely shocked.

"They... what?"

"They blew the fucking thing up." He manages a smile, somehow, tight and angry, but it's a weary anger, anger without any real object. The people he could be usefully angry at are dead. "Should've gone home when I had the chance."

Slowly, Mike sinks down beside him on the cot, hands on his knees, knuckles and fingers dotted with tiny white scars. Tom knows those hands. He knows them very well by now, and while other memories may have faded, his memories of those hands are still sharp enough to cut.

"So that's it?"

Tom shrugs. "Probably. I've got people looking into other ways to... to uncouple, or whatever, but I've just got a feeling. That was it. And they knew it. I've got men looking to me for..." He laughs, a quick bark, full of bitterness. "Hope. That they can still get home. I don't have any left. And everything here is fucking falling apart."

He looks up at Mike and he thinks _Yes, this was pointless, but if this is then everything is and just being here, with you, I can live with that._ "I came here because I don't know what else to do anymore."

"You shouldn't..." Mike looks away again, swallowing hard, and Tom's seen the walls crack, just a little, just a slow wobble at the top, and he thinks about the times when he'd been able to bring them down with a single touch. "Dammit, Tom, if you'd just fucking--I don't even--" He turns back to Tom, and there on his face is pain, finally, open and broken and bleeding all over the place, and it's almost a relief to see. He'd left rather than let it show. Maybe, for him, it had always been easier to run.

"You should have _gone home._ You stayed with me like you were doing me some big fucking favor. You stayed with _us._ I told you it couldn't work like that and you didn't _listen._"

"I was always bad at that." He manages another smile, weaker, and now his eyes are stinging again, brimming with tears he didn't think he had anymore. Yes, he hadn't listened. He'd stayed and tried to rebuild, because he'd never known when to let go, except it had been too much in the end. And those hands, those touches, less and less of them, and no way to heal all the little wounds. Mike ran to save himself. For the first time since Tom had known him. "I'm listening now. I'm trying, Mike." _Even if it's pointless._

"What do you want?" The question is asked wearily, helplessly, and every aspect of Mike's body radiates defeat. It's not what he'd wanted to see. Tom shakes his head.

"I don't know." Slowly, hesitantly, he reaches out and traces a fingertip over Mike's scarred cheekbone. So many scars. Somehow even when Florence healed him it was never flawless the way it was with everyone else. It never completely took. "I wanted to see you again."

"Hobbes..."

"Don't say anything." His fingers find Mike's lips and still them. "Just... I'll leave tomorrow, I promise, just stay here..." And space changes shape somehow, and it's not his fingers against Mike's lips anymore, and when he finally gets bare skin under his hands it's just like he remembers, all of it, like nothing ever changed, the way they move together, the quiet sounds, the feeling of stealing something that isn't theirs to have. Mike plunges into him, teeth at his neck, and it's still the easiest thing he's ever done.

Eventually the last candle goes out.  


* * *

  
When the sun rises he's alone. It's not unexpected. He glances to the side, at his wrist, the rising bruises there, and when he smiles it doesn't feel as strained. But he's going back alone. For a moment the temptation to stay is almost overpowering. Stay here, with Mike, learn his magic, pray in the darkness to a god he no longer entirely believes in. He could do it. Sure.

No, he couldn't. Because last night had been the easiest thing he's ever done, and if he stays here it won't happen again. He knows it, sure as he knows anything else.

So he gets up, dresses, washes his face and hands in the basin of water provided, and when he steps out of the front door the Abbot is waiting for him, looking off at the sunrise with a serene expression.

"I trust your accommodations were adequate." The way it's said, it's more an assumption than a question, but Tom nods.

"They were great, thanks."

The Abbot waves a dismissive hand. "Don't thank us. It is required by the rules of our order. Only--" And he gives Tom a pointed look. "If you could see your way to getting us any of the amenities we discussed. If you were feeling a need to... act directly on your gratitude."

"I'll look into it," Tom says patiently. He's so tired of being patient in these kinds of contexts. But in his mind, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Mike's mutters a few choice comments and he has to fight back a smile.

No more of that, now.

"Well, I guess I'll be--" Tom starts, and then stops when the Abbot holds up a hand, looking suddenly terse and displeased.

"There is one of our order who has... elected to leave us and join with you. He claims that he has been called to do work in the City."

Behind them, the door opens and closes again, and Tom doesn't turn at first, because while he suspects he doesn't quite dare to believe it, but when he finally does turn, what he notices is that Mike has shaved.

And it turns out that walking away is easy too, if you don't do it alone. And the sun keeps on rising.


End file.
